Nonfiction
My son is a rule follower and rules generate endless questions, the answers to which often reflect the crushing reality that I cannot guarantee his safety, that there is an unsettling element of chance in a city of over eight million people.
Dr. H’s earnestness was more apparent the second time we met with him, when we weren’t hearing the bad news for the first time. In a full-lit room not dimmed for ultrasounds, he was a handsome, dark-haired man, a decade younger than Cheryl and I.
I know who you are. You are the girl of twenty, in that black and white photograph I held onto for years, that girl so beautiful she filled me with shame, just as she filled me with pride.
If this scene—these baskets of bread, this mediocre rice, that parking lot awash with light—is familiar to me from all the other funerals we’ve attended here, how much more familiar is it to him? He drags his fork across his plate and the room seems to collapse.
You float down the river and soon learn this isn’t a joy ride, you’re not free yet, of duty, of care, of what binds you to the earth; there’s one more job to do. It’s your task to turf the unessential cargo.
Thato is a small sad boy who has come to stay at the safe home in Lesotho, up in the cloudvoid in the eastern mountains of Mokhotlong district. His mother is dead and his father is off working somewhere…
You buy entirely too much at the store, but no matter—you will be on this diet for a while. At home, you unload each item with a quiet smile and feel a pinching like a tiny crab below your belly. You imagine a poppy seed nestling in, burrowing, seeking shelter within you, preparing to stay.
A compliment from the dying, or from the dead, is no faint praise. After Father Marcel died, he came to me in a dream and said, “I liked you very much.” Not the Great Commandment that he kept, his job description. Gloriously less. “I liked you very much.” Those words his imprimatur on my grief.
No wonder that now, on the streets of Lvov, one could see smiles on the faces looking out the windows. Theirs was a joy of expectation. The hour of revenge was coming! The Jews of Lvov already knew what had been going on in German-occupied Warsaw, Lodz, and Krakow. But, so far, for almost a week, only ominous silence ruled the deserted streets in Lvov.